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Showing posts with label Alaskan Nights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Alaskan Nights. Show all posts
Friday, November 16, 2012
Review: Come Fly With Me by Addison Fox
Come Fly With Me
Author: Addison Fox
Release Date: Nov. 6, 2012
Publisher: Signet Eclipse
Alaskan Nights #2
ISBN: #9780451238498
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Format(s): Paperback (386 pgs), e-book
About the book:
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How do you say no to a man at thirty-thousand feet?
When Grier Thompson is called to Indigo, Alaska to deal with the estate of her late, estranged father, the last thing she expected to find was a hotly contested will, a hostile half-sister who never knew Grier existed, or for that matter, an entire town that doesn’t take kindly to this stranger. Except maybe for Mick O’Shaughnessy.
An Indigo native, Mick has all he wants in life: a soft flannel shirt, a nice cottage, and a thriving airline charter business. Could this simple life get any better? One look at Grier and Mick discovers the answer is a resounding, “yes.” She thinks so too—and if it weren’t for her family baggage, maybe she could relax and enjoy herself before it’s time to return to real life.
But then an unexpected visitor from Grier’s past unsettles the entire town just when the residents were finally starting to warm to her. By the time Mick comes out of the clouds to realize he’s fallen head over heels in love, it might be just too late to win Grier’s heart.
What Nima’s talking about:
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It’s no secret that I’ve been waiting a year for this book. Last year I fell in love with the little town of Indigo, Alaska and its quirky, love-obsessed inhabitants in Addison Fox’s Baby It’s Cold Outside, book one of the Alaskan Nights Series. I’m happy to report that it was not a one-book wonder. If that book was the courtship, this one, Come Fly With Me, is the marriage because now I feel like I’m a member of the family. It’s not necessary to have read the first book, but doing so will make Come Fly With Me a richer experience as we learn the back stories of several of our favorite eccentrics. We become more embedded in lives of the characters and it’s a happy place to be—homey. Better still, those stories continue to move the main narrative forward and don’t slow it down as unessential tangents.
The main focus of book one was the love story between Sloan McKinley and her best friend Grier Thompson’s attorney, Walker Montgomery. Book two focuses on Grier and Mick O’Shaughnessy. Book three, Just in Time, expected out in August 2013, focuses on Roman Forsyth and his high school sweetheart, Avery. All three men make up “the grandsons” of Indigo’s powerhouse matriarchs. The grandsons have grown-up together and are friends, but each, while ruggedly hunky, has carved out his own niche. Mick O’Shaughnessy is a talented pilot, Roman Forsyth is a paparazzi-followed playboy, local legend and professional hockey player in New York, and Walker Montgomery is a successful attorney. Can I tell you that I’m giddy about the fact that Fox has already set us up in Come Fly With Me for at least two more stories still to come? There is an excerpt in the back of Come Fly With Me for Roman’s story. Another year to wait. *heavy sigh*
Once again Fox brings her smart, sassy sense of humor with zingers like, “Grier dropped onto the bed and reached for a pillow, tossing it at Avery’s head. ‘You’ve got a one-track mind.’” Avery replies, “It’s a rare and awesome gift. And like all gifts, it must be protected, nurtured and treated with the utmost respect.” Grier is with her girlfriends the way I am with mine. It was just fun to be on the inside.
For personal reasons Come Fly With Me struck some emotional cords. Parts of it were hard for me to read, but I have to share this little tidbit that I completely identified with, “…that extraordinarily reasonable voice in her head whispered. It was the same voice that told her to eat broccoli and carrots instead of cake and as far as she was concerned, the prissy bitch could just suck it.” Call me schizophrenic, but this is the kind of conversation that often goes on inside my head. It is Grier’s personality to stay somewhat inside her head and unfortunately Mick’s too. These two probably spend too much time trying to think for the other person or get the other to talk, but in this case, it adds to the tension of the climax.
Addison Fox does a great job with contemporary romance. It’s a genre that can take a lot, especially its readers, for granted. Fox does not. She takes the time to put out a good story, not just a steamy romance. Definitely worth the read.
Nima’s Rating:
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Loved it - enthusiastically recommend (A)
Purchase Info:
Reviews in the Series:
Labels:
4.5 stars,
Addison Fox,
Alaskan Nights,
contemporary romance,
Nima Review,
Signet
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1 comments
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Review: Baby, It's Cold Outside
Baby It’s Cold OutsideAuthor: Addison Fox
Release Date: Nov. 1, 2011
Publisher: Signet
Alaskan Nights #1
ISBN: #978-0451235213
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Format(s): Paperback (384 pages), e-book
Book Source: Publisher
About the book: |
After a frantic call from her best friend Grier, Sloan McKinley travels to the heart of the frozen Alaskan wilderness. Grier’s at her wit’s end, sorting through an inheritance from her estranged father, and the residents of small-town Indigo haven’t exactly welcomed her with open arms.
The last thing she expects is to be won over by Indigo’s town matriarchs: three feisty grandmothers who’ve created an annual contest in an attempt to get their grandsons married off. Although initially shocked by the Great Bachelor Competition, Sloan can’t deny the appeal of the rugged local men—particularly Walker Montgomery, a town lawyer and one of the eligible grandsons.
Before Sloan can help her friend and hightail it out of the clutches of the matchmaking matriarchs, she finds herself falling in love with the wild outdoors…and with one of the indigo’s most beloved residents. There’s just one question that remains: is the town's most confirmed bachelor ready to get caught?
What Nima’s talking about: |
Baby It’s Cold Outside is the first book in Addison Fox’s contemporary romance Alaskan Nights series. It’s tough being the first book in any series because you have to spend a lot of time introducing characters, building and painting the sets of our minds’ stages, and somehow manage to tell a good story that sets us up for all the books to follow. Sadly many times the first book is the best in the series, never quite capturing the same magic or charm in the books that come after it. Even more frequent, however, the first book is a weak read, trying to be too many things all at the same time. I am happy to report that Fox’s first foray into contemporary romance was not a disappointment. Coming in at nearly 400 pages, there was plenty of description, but I never felt burdened by it. In fact, I finished the book in only two days. I just liked these characters enough to want to hang-out with them on a Saturday afternoon.
Set in the fictional town of Indigo, Alaska, city girls and best friends Sloan McKinley and Grier Thompson find themselves, at first, clearly as fish out of water. While all of us have probably had that experience at least once in our lives and can completely relate to the feelings of disorientation and awkwardness, I have to note a personal connection here. I grew up in California where it is sunny and warm, but have been living around the Midwest for the last twenty years, including two years in Minnesota, where I discovered that you can actually feel the difference between -20 and -30. Cold isn’t just cold. Minnesota was also one of the best places I’ve ever lived. I was inclined to like the people of Indigo who chose to make their home in a place where you plug your car in at night so it will start in the morning, aren’t embarrassed to wear a hat no matter how unfashionable it may be in the name of preventing frostbite, and Mother Nature routinely puts on a breath-taking show of northern lights. Like me, it didn’t take long for these city girls to begin to see their snowy surroundings through different eyes.
The main focus of this book is the love story between Sloan and Grier’s attorney, Walker Montgomery. Walker is one of “the grandsons.” The grandsons have grown up together and are friends, but each, while ruggedly hunky, has carved out his own niche. Mick O’Shaughnessy is a talented pilot, Roman Forsyth is a paparazzi-followed playboy, local legend and professional hockey player in New York, and Sloan’s Walker Montgomery is a successful attorney.
Better than a trip down snowy memory lane for me was the cast of Indigo’s inhabitants. I wanted to have breakfast at the diner, walk around the town’s monument to love inscribed with the words, “For those we’re not allowed to keep”, and fly above the mountain peaks in Mick’s plane. The citizens of Indigo are genuine and snarky. I love snarky.
Walker scrubbed a hand over his jaw, the day’s stubble making a satisfying scratch. “There really are no secrets in this town. How’d you find out?”
“The note I got in study hall pretty much tipped me off.”
“Smart-ass.”
Even snarky with himself, when Walker first tries to summarize his irrational feelings about Sloan he thinks, “a bright, shiny Zamboni with a heartbreaking smile, warm blue eyes, and truly superior breasts. And that, my friends, is the sign of a man completely losing it.” Don’t you just love a man that can’t help himself from losing it when the right woman comes along?
The story is a relatively predictable one for regular romance readers. There’s no surprise in boy meets girl, boy is attracted to girl against his better judgment, girl is attracted to boy against her better judgment, both give in and live happily-ever-after. But this book is witty, clever, and wonderfully, humanly flawed characters grow. It’s dependable. It’s the one you want to read on the train, on the treadmill, waiting to pick a kid up from practice, or anywhere you are when you’d rather be somewhere else.
This is a romance and there are plenty of intimate moments. Sloan notes, “The cold that had seeped into her bones from the moment she’d fled outside was rapidly replaced with a liquid heat that spread through her like a wild blaze and she knew—with absolute certainty—how the denizens of Alaska stayed warm.” I finished the story with a warm feeling about Indigo and its population of just over 700. I’m looking forward to the next book. Baby It’s Cold Outside sets us up for Mick and Grier’s story, Come Fly With Me, due out in November of 2012, and Roman’s story should follow the year after that. I don’t think Fox is limited to just the grandsons. If each book improves, there is a hearty stock of both quirky and charming bachelors in Indigo just waiting for their romance to find them.
Nima’s Rating: |
Enjoyed - strongly recommend (A-)
Purchase Information:
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